The Doc Is In

…. The NAACP, this vestigial bone on the American body politic, has thrust itself into the headlines by voting, at its annual meeting Tuesday, to censure as “racist” the Tea Party movement. This controversial public rebuke—delivered a day after the first lady, Michelle Obama, addressed the NAACP’s conference—has opened up a raw, new racial front in the run-up to the November elections. In effect, the self-congratulatory, post-racial Obama camp is reaching for the crudest weapon in the Democratic arsenal: the racial blunderbuss.

Of course, desperate times call for desperate measures, and the NAACP is going back to an old playbook. The NAACP is resorting to the Jacksonian (Jesse, not Andrew) ploy to use the race card (a) to rally blacks to the mid-terms; and (b) to intimidate the mainstream media, so that it doesn’t report critically on a liberal administration, urging it instead to focus on the perceived sins of the Tea Party movement.

If black Americans are suffering due to our current economic woes, Obama’s own policies are hardly helping them. The NAACP can’t bitch about “the Man” anymore because the Man is Obama. And so instead it turns its racially monolithic vituperation on the Tea Party, which has never been in power, and has had no impact on the economic condition of black Americans—except to advocate policies (smaller government, lower taxes, radically reduced deficits, etc.) that would likely improve the standard of living of all Americans (blacks included). In fact, the Tea Party is a greater friend of black Americans, one might say, than the administration, and is much more representative of America than the NAACP. (There are many more black members of the Tea Party—however you define that movement—than there are, by definition, non-black members of the NAACP.)

The NAACP senses—knows—that the electoral momentum is building inexorably against President Obama. And they hope to slow it by playing the race card. Let there be no doubt that nothing would have been tabled at this NAACP meeting without President Obama’s imprimatur—especially with the first lady as the keynote speaker. Our first black president—with his lowest approval ratings ever—is using his race politically, through a surrogate. But shameless as all this is, it may have some effect. As Shelby Steele, a political scientist at the Hoover Institution, told me, “racist stigma in America is so powerful that truth and reason look meager next to it. Any populist movement—such as the Tea Party—that is predominantly white, has this vulnerability of seeming to be a throwback to the nation’s racist past.” ….

Source: HERE